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American actor Richard Dreyfuss holds court in the Canadian Pavilion on the Riviera beach in Cannes, France, nattily attired in a gray suit and cap that matches his goatee.

He looks completely at home — and why shouldn’t he?

Dreyfuss, 65, may hail from Brooklyn, N.Y., but to Canadians he will forever be a Montrealer named Duddy Kravitz, the scrappy title hustler of Ted Kotcheff’s 1974 Canuck film classic The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, adapted from the Mordecai Richler novel of the same name.

“I feel like I’m a little more than an honorary Canadian, but less than a citizen,” Dreyfuss said last week with an impish wink.

“My girlfriend at the time was from Montreal. She told me that if Rene Levesque won the Quebec election, the Americans would have tanks on the Vermont border. And I said, ‘I don’t think so,’ and I was right!”

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A restored print of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz debuted at the Cannes Film Festival, in the Cannes Classics section. Hence the presence of both Dreyfuss and Kotcheff at the fest. Kotcheff will also be at TIFF Bell Lightbox on Monday to introduce and talk about the film, which was a career maker for both him and Dreyfuss.

But the Oscar-winning Dreyfuss has a lot to say about playing Duddy Kravitz, too, one of his most memorable roles in a nearly 50-year film and TV career that also includes Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Goodbye Girl and American Graffiti.

Q: In Canada, Duddy Kravitz is considered a very Canadian character, the punk kid who wants to buy a Quebec lake because “a man without land is nobody.”

A: Well, he’s very Canadian, very Jewish, very urban Jewish, and very North American Jewish urban.

Q: Ted Kotcheff says the film drew some criticism upon its release from people who felt it approached anti-Semitism in its depiction of Montreal Jewish life. There are apparently still people today who feel that way.

A: Only Jews do. And it’s not anti-Semitism, really, it’s just that you don’t wash your dirty linen in public.

It’s about a guy, Duddy, who wants to be rich and his message is “Get out of my way.” And that’s kind of like a lot of people I know! When people talk about themselves, they always talk about themselves through a filter of their virtues, and when Mordecai wrote this book, he was the first one to say we have morals, too.

Q: Is Duddy a character who stays with you? Do you ever think about him?

A: Well, yeah, I do. I always remember the shoot when I play poker, because Ted Kotcheff taught me how to play poker. I’d love to do the sequel.

Q: Is anyone talking about making a sequel?

A: I am, but no one else is. It’s the only character I’ve ever played where people are interested in what happened to him. They want to know: what happened to Duddy? And I want to say it. I want to tell them.

I’ve never played a character whose future is so important to him that it became important to the audience. Anyone who’s seen the film says, “What happened to him?” I tell them, “Well, he’s either Donald Trump or he’s a cab driver. Or both.”

Q: Ted Kotcheff said in a chat with TIFF’s Piers Handling that he almost changed his mind about casting you, because he saw you play the introverted Curt in American Graffiti, and Duddy’s a true extrovert.

A: I didn’t know that. But I’m glad he saw American Graffiti. When George Lucas was casting for that film, he told me I could play either Curt or the little guy (Ron Howard’s role). I said, “I want to play Curt, because he’s reflective. He knows that 20 years from now, he will remember that night. He knows it. So I want to play that.”

So that scene where he’s walking down the aisle and he tries to open up his locker and they change the number, I put in the movie just so that you could see him doing it smiling and remembering it, filing it away.

Q: While you’ve been at Cannes, you’ve also introduced an evening screening of Jaws on the beach. Did you stick around to see how people reacted to it?

A: No, because that’s one film I know how people are going to react. I’ve seen everyone from the highest caste of Hindu aristocrats to royalty fall apart and wet their pants watching it, so I know that feeling. It’s one of those movies that you just can’t turn off when you come upon it. You stay with it.

Q: When you find it on TV, do you watch it?

A: Yeah, unless there’s a good porn film!

Q: You’ve been making another movie in Canada recently, Cas & Dylan, the directing debut of actor Jason Priestley. What’s it about?

A: It’s a road trip about this crazy girl (Tatiana Maslany) and this doctor, who has been wanting to off himself for awhile because of the lost love in his life. She drags herself into his life and interferes with all of his plans.

Q: Maybe we might see it at TIFF in September?

A: Maybe — as long as it doesn’t interfere with the Nobel Prize schedule!

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